Fulfilled Expectations

I'll never forget one day when I was a math teacher. As we all gathered in the math department office to eat lunch, several teachers started an intellectual discussion about derivatives, the unit circle, and other, more complicated math issues. They quickly left me behind with their far superior knowledge, but all I could do was start giggling. Unable to see what was so funny about derivatives, they asked me why I was laughing. "Because this is what our students think we must talk about over lunch!"

And ever since then I've noticed occasions in my life when things have happened exactly as people would picture them, as I would picture them. There was the day when I held Patrick for the first time, and looking down at that tiny body looking up at me and feeling the complete awe that I was a mother and this was the child I had waited so long to meet--that was absolutely how I expected to feel (even if none of the rest of the birth was at all as I'd expected). It was the same when the nurses placed a gooey Nathan on my belly moments after his birth, and I felt this surge of love for him, my first words to him being, "I love you, little Nathan."

Then yesterday, I looked over at Patrick having lunch and realized that it was exactly how I expected life with a two-year-old to be.
He even gave me a cheesy grin (get it? he's eating a grilled cheese) to complete the look.